Teachers’ Perspectives on MTSS

Gagan Shergill

Questions

I’m interested in exploring what teachers discuss regarding Multi-tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS) on Reddit.

Questions:

  1. What topics are most frequently brought up when teachers discuss MTSS?
  2. Do topics discussed change over time?

Context

The data for this project comes from r/Teachers a subreddit with 1.3 million members and is “dedicated to open discussion about all things teaching”. Since MTSS plays a big role in public schools, I thought that this subreddit might contain some insights into how teachers feel about it. Since Reddit allows for anonymous posts to be made, it may allow teachers to express their true opinions regarding MTSS. The primary audience for this research may include school leaders attempting to implement MTSS in their districts.

Methods

Source:

Data was scrapped using Reddit’s API through the RedditExtractoR package. Specifically, I scrapped any post that contained “MTSS” or “Multi-tiered Systems of Supports” resulting in 331 posts.

Data Processing:

I used the tm package for tokenization, tidyverse, and tidytext for tidying data.

Data Analysis:

To answer Question 1 and 2, I mainly used word counts and tf-idf.

Question 1: What do teachers talk about?

After running RedditExtractor and getting rid of duplicate posts, we end up with 331 unique posts about MTSS. I also created some date (day, month, and year) columns for later analysis. Check out a glimpse of the data.

Rows: 311
Columns: 9
$ Year      <chr> "2023", "2019", "2021", "2024", "2021", "2025", "2021", "202…
$ Month     <chr> "06", "10", "11", "02", "11", "01", "10", "02", "08", "10", …
$ Day       <chr> "07", "30", "05", "13", "02", "15", "24", "08", "07", "25", …
$ timestamp <dbl> 1686169117, 1572398301, 1636072715, 1707789920, 1635814559, …
$ title     <chr> "How much money is the right amount", "A day in the life..."…
$ text      <chr> "We have to ask ourselves, how much money would we be willin…
$ subreddit <chr> "Teachers", "Teachers", "Teachers", "Teachers", "Teachers", …
$ comments  <dbl> 357, 163, 79, 94, 34, 30, 74, 76, 14, 9, 14, 5, 15, 10, 25, …
$ url       <chr> "https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/143nqkq/how_much…

We can also see how many posts about MTSS were made each year. It looks like 2024 was the peak with more than 60 posts, and 2013 and 2014 had 1 post each.

  • Data were filtered to include only posts from 2019 to 2024 to create a cleaner dataset.

  • After tokenizing and filtering stop words, the following insights were observed:

    • The top words include “support,” likely referring to “multi-tiered systems of support.”

    • Emotional expressions like “feel” and stakeholder terms like “parents,” “admin,” and “children” are prominent.

    • “Behavior” stands out, indicating many posts may focus on student behaviors.

Question 2: Does what they talk about change over time?

Using tf_idf can give us some insight into the unique words for each year. From the charts on the next slide we can see that there were very different topics of discussion around MTSS across years.

  • 2019: Common words included “state’s,” “holidays,” “directors,” and “down’s” (possibly a misspelling of Down syndrome). The top word was “fcps,” likely referring to Fairfax County Public Schools and its MTSS system.

  • 2021: Unique words focused on politicians, such as “yang” (likely Andrew Yang) and “Blasio” (likely Mayor Bill de Blasio of NYC, known for his focus on education).

  • 2022: The top word was “KIPP,” referencing the public charter school network.

  • 2023: The top word was “chatgpt,” reflecting the rising impact of AI in education that year.

  • 2024: The top word was “unreasonable,” possibly expressing frustration with unreasonable demands.

Conclusion

  • Question 1- What topics are most frequently brought up when teachers discuss MTSS?
    • Teachers appear to frequently discuss education itself, key stakeholders (parent, admin, children), and potentially discuss student behaviors.
  • Question 2 - Do topics discussed change over time?
    • Using tf_idf revealed that the most important words did differ by year, with many of the words discussing specific districts, political figures, or major events during that period of time (e.g. the release of ChatGPT).

Next Steps

  • Implications - Administrators seeking to implement MTSS within their districts may need to attend to factors such as student behaviors, as well as the current political and societal events that may be impacting teachers or the district as a whole.

  • Limitations - A key limitation is the relatively small (N = 331) sample size, as well as the lack of context to support interpretation of data. Using a qualitative approach such as reviewing each post based on key words identified through text mining may yield more valid results.

  • Future Analysis - In addition to using qualitative techniques described above, using sentiment analysis may also allow us to better identify how educators feel about MTSS. In addition, topic modeling might be used to better capture what exact topics are being discussed.